Carbon Neutral Group (CNG) ensures that affordable housing organizations deliver high-performance, low-carbon buildings that are energy-efficient and durable, while providing year-round comfort with a low energy burden to more income-qualified residents.
CNG’s technical design, quality-control, and commissioning services are informed by our expertise and experience with hundreds of completed carbon-neutral living units in 2024-2025.
Streamlined build timelines, reduced project costs, and lower O&M expenses over time are baked-in benefits that more than offset the costs of our services many times over.
CNG delivers tangible value by collaborating with project owners, architects, MEP engineers, prime contractors, and their subcontractors throughout the design-build process to leverage our in-depth technical expertise alongside new incentives for beneficial electrification. As the project owner’s third-party representative, we raise the bar with better building design and boots-on-the-ground accountability.
CNG ensures compliance with Qualified Allocation Plan (QAP) criteria, Green Building Certification, and local energy codes on your organization’s journey from compliance to excellence in low-carbon affordable housing.
Carbon Neutral Group is a third-party quality control firm that helps OAC teams deliver warranty-grade completed projects on time and within budget with fewer delays, change orders, and failed inspections.
CNG achieves improved outcomes and reduces costs throughout the entire project lifecycle by providing:
- Design-phase MEP engineering review and energy code study to reduce submittal revisions and permit delays,
- Refined design specifications to meet new qualified allocation plan (QAP) requirements for beneficial electrification, specifically building envelope, solar power, electric vehicle charging, domestic hot water, and heat pump-based heating/cooling.
- Mechanical design services, including building heating/cooling load calculations, ductwork design, HVAC equipment specifications, and technical review of MEP engineering plans,
- Contractor qualification vetting and proposal review, including competence, competitiveness, subcontractor supervision, and scope-gap analysis to minimize costly change orders,
- Timely job-site quality control inspections to address deficiencies as early as possible,
- Final building performance testing and documentation for energy-code compliance, including building envelope air-leakage and HVAC system commissioning.
Third-Party Review and Quality Control Inspections
Buildings are becoming increasingly complex, and we want them designed and built on ever-shortening timelines. When owners seek to minimize change orders resulting from errors and omissions, we must recognize that the demands we place on architects, engineers, and contractors to lower their fees while fast-tracking their services increase the risk of errors.
The owner has the option to employ a specialty firm to review the documents prepared by the design team and inspect the work performed by the contractors. In the past decade, specialty firms have emerged, offering interdisciplinary plan review services to provide technical guidance for drawings and specifications for compliance, constructability, and quality assurance field inspections.
While some owners argue that this should be an essential service already provided by the designer, the architect and engineer are usually too close to their work and driven by other forces (juggling multiple projects, impending deadlines, and tight labor budgets) to step back and review it. These circumstances are especially true during the waning days of the construction document phase when the architect and sub-consultants are racing to complete their work and wrap it together in a bid package.
The cost of a plan review-to-project completion quality-control team like CNG can run from as little as $25,000 for smaller projects ($5M-$10M) up to $100,000 for multimillion-dollar projects ($50M-$100M). This investment will often pay for itself many times over in cost-avoidance savings. It is a “pay a little now” proposition versus “pay a lot more later”.
Rather than create another project budget line item for these services, funding for these cost-avoidance services can come from the project contingency budget, based on the premise that it will reduce exposure to costly project delays and change orders.
